hidden villages
by hewhoistomriddle
Summary: drabbles on various characters.
1. Kushina

_Kushina. Minato. Aversion to perfection._

* * *

Kushina's straggling in line, thinking along the lines of '_anyone who cuts will be shot_', in her typical harsh fashion, because everyone's equally hungry and impatient and desperate for the cold, gray rations being passed off as food. Really, however, she doesn't _have _to wait, shinobi's privileges and all that, if nothing else she could take them all out, but Kushina's stupidly righteous when she's starving and so she waits in civvies, hair and skin and clothing dulled to brown by the endless surge of dust, unremarkable in the crowds.

The whispers reach her first, apparently faster than his flash technique, but they barely prepare her for when she finally sees Minato. His brightness actually hurts her eyes. He is, he is larger-than-life beautiful, a veritable prince on a white horse, clean and obnoxiously perfect, starkly delineated from this miserable village, a world away. People around her stir - even the ignorants and the opportunists and the uttery ugly in both body and soul - and all lavish him with their eyes.

_He's mine_, Kushina wants to say, the words are fierce in her mind, but-

Here, in the shoes of the ordinary man, _feeling _painfully ordinary, Minato is something that cannot be owned: a force, powerful and terrifying and awe-inspiring. Here, she is not shinobi, nor the powerful jailer of the Kyuubi, nor his going-to-be wife, and she catches a glimpse of that blinding intensity.

_The shinobi genius._  
_That's him. He's from Konoha, you know._  
_Oh my god._

_Look here_, Kushina wills him, for once, as many young girls and women and desperates willed able-bodied shinobi, _see me, spare me a glance_.

But Minato passes over her without recognition flaring in his distilled-sky eyes, another faceless person to feed and protect and possibly die for, and Kushina hates him a little for it.


	2. Tsunade

_Tsunade. Viva La Vida._

* * *

It's hard to be forgiving when you're all sloshed up and your head's burning in hell - _and could you please turn off that goddamn sun before I die_ - and you've lost another family fortune and another wad of self-respect in a night of endless alcohol and gambling and no-strings-attached fucking.

It's hard to keep calm when you know you've been acting like some self-destructive fool that's _so not you_ and _what happened with your life_, _why the running away_, you're supposed to be made of tougher stuff than this -

It's hard to gloss over harsh realities, like the drowning in debt thing and the dark void of age, when the truth is you've used to be the village princess and the (second) smartest in your class and hell, you've won _wars _and now you're a sap and a coward and slumming in the city's dirtiest districts pretending you're done with caring.

It's hard, but you're strong in the worst ways, and you can keep your face lit up and unaffected, until the past catches up with you.

(You dread that day.)_  
_


	3. Haku's Mother

_Haku's Mother._

* * *

The nights are made of inky darkness in Kirigakure, still as pondwater after a rainfall, and suffocating.

These nights she restlessly makes flowers of ice bloom across her palm and wonders if she might die young. It is a stark possibility; she carries the blood, the hunt had begun, and she watches, across the gnarled trees and the orange glow of firelights across a small lake: a family with breath corrosive enough to melt her diamond-ice being slaughtered. A raw terrible anger unfurls through her limbs, stemming from the pit of her stomach and ending at her fingertips, tapering to icy needlepoints.

It would be fair, perhaps even beautiful, to end it all in a burst of wild glorious fury, skewer the _fuck _out of all of them, exchange hatred for hatred. But she is not made that way, she is ice itself, and if she fights, it will a slow, secret battle with her frost creeping into their bones and and their marrow and their spirit.

Before the last colicky child (with a secret in its blood) is killed, she is gone in a flash of dark hair, invisible in the night.

(She dies young, but quite differently from what she'd expected, because she's traded glass for diamonds, and the warm hearth for the fierce battleglow, a weepy begging sort-of-love for glory, and doesn't have time to feel regret when her husband turns on her.)


	4. Sasori

_Sasori. Childhood._

* * *

Sasori does not remember illness. Even though he should, because the heat of the the desert was a blistering welt upon the skin, and one summer all the livestock died and flies and beetles spread disease everywhere; shinobi and civilian alike succumbed to it and he, a babe then, had been delirious with fever for days. He does not remember Chiyo had spent entire days and nights in a sweltering greenhouse, wearing herself thin to find him relief.

Sasori does not remember coldness. Predictably he shouldn't. Because Suna was made of brightly-lit days and warm, whispery nights and during the rare, violent storms, he had been cradled gently in a mother's firm embrace, in hands freckled by the sun and tickled by long hair in the hues of fire.

Sasori does not remember hapiness. Pure, simple joy that is - the idea of a heaven beyond understanding, the belief in a world too unwavering to be meaningless, puppet instruction given hand-to-hand, a genin team's unbridled adoration, a nation and a geography that saw fit to sew itself to his moniker (_Sasori of the Red Sand_) like he belonged there, his place.

It takes one good punch to jolt his memory.


	5. NejiHina

_Neji/Hinata. The byakugan._

* * *

Neji uses the byakugan differently from most Hyuuga.

While their world expands with it, stretching yards to hundreds, flicking away hard stone walls and flesh alike to transparency, his _recedes _to sharp points, miniscule details like spark-swift movements, the pulsating glow of chakra, a heartbeat.

Ultimately he's a better shinobi for it, Tenten decides, her eyes trained on the economy of his movements as he and Lee spar the afternoon away. There's a displeased set to his jaw, distracting from the unbelievable symmetry of his face, and it's not surprising.

Two weeks ago, Hinata had almost died with the rest of Konoha. He'd let go of the brutally-directed resentment but, in the end, what tied him to Hinata was more than that, something that claimed him at four years old and would never relinquish, not when he was fourteen, not when he is forty, never.

Because Neji's sight had always been trained on the certain singularities, and Hinata was, always will be, the one focal point of his life.


	6. Hiashi's wife

_Hiashi's wife. Pure headcanon._

* * *

_Hyuuga eyes_, it's a sharp feeling on the back of her neck, because it's the stern gazes of the creeper Hyuuga twins of the class below, Hiashi and Hizashi, who've taken to walking around the Academy with their guards and their bloodlines and their frosty-cold airs.

_Hyuuga eyes_, what an unfair match, even if she's had a year's experience over him and no small skill with jutsu, she's still at a disadvantage, and he passes her a smile of such arrogance that she's blushing in fury – because she's worked so hard for this, practiced all day and all night and he can't take this dream away smiling like that – and wants to assault him bodily, clan heir or not.

_Hyuuga eyes_, the war needs for them, and she sees him, sometimes, in the midst of smoke and ruins, veins bulging around his eyes, mouth downturned in worry and hard decisions, and regards him with what might be called admiration.

_Hyuuga eyes_, hundreds of them, and she's so grateful for the thick swathe of wedding veil that hides her mortification because it's all so grand and she was the kunoichi from the family down the street, possibly distantly related to the Uchiha but nothing to write home – this home in particular – about.

_Hyuuga eyes_, her daughter has them, she smiles tenderly, a bit sadly, and kisses Hanabi goodbye.


	7. Kushina 2

_Kushina. Wartime.

* * *

_

Once, Kushina left Konoha.

She wass still dressed in jounin fatigues, grimy with mud and sweat, and her sensei's just died – a swift kunai to the throat, and he was suddenly keening in the river, turning water to rust – and Minato's team was still _missing in action, Uzumaki-san, but I wouldn't worry_, and the village was pouring more and more –_ money, effort, lives –_ into a war they were losing. She left because she's had enough of losing faith in people; she's out of outspoken bravery and boldness, out of things to sacrifice, miserable, like a well bled dry of the water which gives it life and purpose.

She found herself in a bar in a small village made even more insignificant by war, wresting composure from a bottle until her hands stopped shaking, swaying in time to the pitter-patter of raindrops – a phantom dance – audacious hope making her flimsy white dress and stalwart belief in her comrades her dancing shoes. She kisses a man who has hair like watered-down sunlight, not quite like Minato's, because his lips tasted clean of blood and despair, his eyes aren't bloodshot and hard, and that's all she wanted. She stumbled, alone, into a motel bed that smells like fabric softener and warmth, and her knees curled to her chest and she cried, for all the right reasons, all the wrong reasons, and no reason in particular.

Then she went back.


	8. Deidara's Mother

_Deidara's Mother. Self-destruction at it's finest._

* * *

She is called the most self-destructive brat in her generation, a hailstorm of fury and genius, an image of ruins and smoke and electricity.

When she is eighteen, thin limbs and kohl-rimmed eyes, she falls into bed with the notorious missing-nin who's killed two of her uncles and lets him fuck her hard, just lies there and takes it, eyes open and indifferent the entire time. She buries a kunai into his heart the same night.

She sobs when giving birth nine months later; he has the same sunfire hair and cruel slanted eyes, and she's never meant to fall in love like this, completely, _desperately_. She is an unfit mother to this creature who needs her more than she can handle, because all she's known is the hard edge of stone and blitzes from the air, how to hurt, how to end a life, and Deidara's cries rupture chords she didn't know she had.

War offers an excuse to leave her son in more capable hands. Above the mutual slaughter she flies, using a technique yet unperfected, scattering Leaf-nin left and right with explosives, her high laughter soaring over the battlements.

They bring her home in a bag, her eyes gouged out and fingers mutilated, once-luxuriant hair singed and brittle. She is almost twenty-one, and ash and regret is writ on her white skin.


	9. Rin

_Rin. Team Yondaime._

* * *

Rin allows herself to believe, just one time, in what everyone says about her sensei. That he is Konoha's God of War, the Yellow Flash, the turning tide of the war, and _he'll come, he'll be there, he'll save you no matter what_.

It is unfair, she knows, to expect so much of him, because he's just as human as any and despite how much he racks up the enemy death toll, astronomical levels, he can't lower theirs.

But she allows herself to hope, even as she sews up Obito's – Obito's and, _dear god_, can she ever forgive herself – eye, that somehow, somehow, her sensei will find a way to defy the finality of death.

He does not – and she is gripped with a grim, dark anger that wants to, and easily could, pin the blame on him. _He wasn't there. He didn't save them. He wasn't fast enough. He didn't love them enough_ – And she catches herself, ashamed and furious, because her sensei really did the best he could, she knows him well enough to read the hard lines of sorrow and fury on his shoulders. She bites off the bloody condemnation on her tongue and, not in any mood to listen to his hypocritical talk of forgiveness, leaves to seek absolution from the stars instead.


	10. Danzo

_Danzo. Sacrifice._

* * *

Danzo remembers clearly the number of deaths he's authorized over the years. The exact figure is _spectacular_, hundreds upon hundreds, remembered in blood and bone, ash and hellfire, poison and ice; and he suffered each one with a blunt harshness and absolutely no mercy. He is called many names for it – _monster, evil, tyrant_, Uchiha Shisui had been particularly creative_ – _and he accepts every single barb and all the furious, hate-heated gazes with contemptuous silence. Because it is Konoha at stake.

The reality is that, in the world of shinobi, every peace is unstable, and complacence is a death warrant, and he'd gladly eat his own heart if given absolute proof that foreign underground forces weren't mobilized at every moment, usurping each other. Sarutobi could blather on about trusted alliances and his student could go about prophesising world peace, but it is Danzo called the pre-emptive strikes which turn the tide of war in their favor, it is he who did all commanded all the torture and espionage so they might have information, and it is he who taught his men suicide tactics that they might protect their own.

It is Danzo who weighed faces against numbers and friends against a mass of faceless strangers and chose the latter.

_(The thing about martyrs is, they always die hated.)_


	11. Haku's Mother 2

_Haku's Mother. Anti-prejudice._

* * *

Someday, she thinks, she'll again see Kirigakure a free woman.

She can stand in the open sun, arms outstretched, and turn the marble cliffs to diamonds with her ice. She can take a running leap into the lake's mirror surface, laughing with her reflection, and freeze the spattering water into an everlasting rosette. She can once more gaze upon the jewel-toned birds and turqoise waters and flowers that bloomed like fire and blood over fields greener than emeralds, talk to the cloying mist that rises with the night, walk with head held upright and eyes – the color of a fearless winter sky – wide open. Someday, she can clasp hands with people without fear of division, without them looking to and fearing the icewater in her veins, nothing unwelcome in their mouths and no weapons up their sleeve._  
_


	12. ShisuiHinata

Written for **theirempires**. Prompt is birds.

___Shisui/Hinata_. Bleeding-heart pigeon.

* * *

The bird has feathers white as doves except for a spot on its chest that cries red like spilled blood, _the bleeding-heart pigeon_, Shisui tells you, _stop fretting, it's not hurt._ But you fret anyway, despite the elegance the bird displays, regal in its cage. There's a sadness to it, you think it must remember the sky and you let it free; it beats its wings and soars and kisses the air and returns to your hand.

_How odd._

Shisui smirks over at your wonder, _told you it'd come back_, and he adds, almost an afterthought, _I would_.

(and one night he does not.)


	13. Shisui

_Naruto: Five Worlds in which Uchiha Shisui Died and One where he never will._

* * *

**_One._**

There was a lot more crying than expected.

Only a child of five, after all, and no matter how much wasted potential, children that age often do not warrant more than an appropriate amount of bowed heads and tautly-held grief. Theirs is soundless death, quiet as lone leaves in the autumn eve, leaving very little emptiness in the world. But during Uchiha Shisui's funeral, a raw ache lingered in the air, thick swathes of hurting that draped itself over the wood of his child-sized coffin, in the drapes, on people's skin. His golden-faced mother was inconsolable, her beautiful shoulders stooped under the burden of outliving a child, a sorrow so heavy it would have anchored her Shunshin forever. His father was away on a mission already a couple of weeks cold, unreachable. His older brother issued orders to have him retrieved, as his wife sat in the corner with a downcast gaze, holding their own son, three-year-old Itachi, who wouldn't stop crying.

**_Two._**

Iwagakure bombed a shelter during the Third Ninja War. Shisui died a statistic, there weren't enough fragments left of him to dredge up an identity. Itachi, had he lived himself, would have known, would've recognized the scorched metal that was proudly _Shisui's necklace_, would've recognized the fingers – hadn't they cupped his own face many many times –, would've recognized the ears – _I'll have the piercing here, right here –,_ would've taken one look and _known_. But Itachi died too.

**_Three._**

Shisui didn't expect to be carrying anything back from the mission in the Hidden Rain aside form the odious memory of abject poverty, mud-strewn streets, human excrement in piles and misery clearly writ on every face he'd met. But he had, an enemy so cleverly hidden, so silent a killer, that he didn't notice it until Itachi pointed out the lesions and the wracking cough and the hollow wheezing in his lungs that interrupted everytime his cousin tried to listen to Shisui's heartbeat.

The prognosis was tuberculosis. White death.

_**Four.**  
_

Itachi's eyes are hard and accusing when he hears the news. The silence that hangs, and his pain is almost impalpable for a moment, the time it takes for an intake of breath, it is sharp like the edges of glass shards. He'd opposed all the plans, eyes disapproving the whole time on a clan that didn't know what it needed as opposed to what it wanted, but no one listened to him and now he is suffering those mistakes. _Kakashi_ and _Gai_ – they were both good men, to be honest, and it couldn't have been easy, but life's unfair that way – of course Shisui didn't stand a chance.

The truth is sharp to strangling. The coup was an unprecedented failure.

**_Five._**

"I need to talk to you, Shisui," Itachi casts a wary narrow-eyed glance around, mistrust tautening his thin shoulders. "But not here."

Shisui measures out his words evenly. "Perhaps the Nakano?"

Itachi smiles like he's grimacing.

**_And Six._**

During one battle in which they were both relatively neutral parties, Hidan saunters up to him, mildly impressed. "Ever heard of Jashin, kid?"


	14. HashiMada

Hashirama/Madara. Legend.

* * *

_Only you can become my legend._

There is only the sound of water running over bare rock, a rushing strong and primordial, when Madara, hidden in the dark shadows of the glade, the watery dawn light quenched far above him, first saw Hashirama. He was kneeling one the riverbanks where the sands were gray as ash and the air misty with cold. Madara was born of war and hunting, of measuring the worth of others with a glance, of _planning_; he decides then, watching the older man draw up the silvery water in thin streams, his movements long-fingered and exact, this will be the man who will not only exist in his universe but whose name will ascend equal to his own, with whom he'll make history with, _his_.

He will find out only later that it was _Senju_ Hashirama he saw, whom he will face time and time again in battle while enmity stretches out between them like a torn decree, with whom he will prop up the bones of a village with upon a lush wild plain, who will be skilled at walking away and letting his silences speak for him, who will love Madara only because Madara will allow it, as all illusions must eventually be allowed to seep into reality for them to sustain. It is only fitting that Madara had already marked him out from the beginning.

Before the Valley of the End, Hashirama would say how remarkable it is that their lives should coincide, pivot around each other, like moons caught in each other's gravity, dovetailing. Madara will blink, and then he will laugh. It is not unremarkable, he would think, when none of their meetings, save the first, had ever been accidental.


	15. HashiMada 2

_Hashirama/Madara. Madness._

* * *

Every Senju has heard this tale at least twice. _The __Uchiha__ are cursed. Bad blood, bad blood, bad blood. _It is muttered over and over by the stooped elderly whose once-proud bones bowed under the interminable wash of hardship, passed around like rations over the campfire, seeped under the children's skin and into their beliefs.

It is said with no small measure of prejudice, but even then, the truth remains that a well of insanity resided in their veins, a mad fury that may flare to life with nary a trigger, an chaotic intensity, a _decay_.

Hashirama has seen it for himself, _once_, a man breaking his brother's head on a rock, only once, and it is enough.

~.~

Madara was different from his clansmen – despite wearing the same dark shock of hair that stood out like fresh blood on pristine white snow, the same uncannily aristocratic facial structure, the same feral body lines, _the same accursed eyes –_ in the way he held himself.

_Precise, certain, absolute_.

He stood as a man apart, with little regard and little contempt for his fellows, solemnly beyond their feeble reach, anchored only by ties of blood, one brother who stood nearly equal with him atop a pile of embers.

_A pillar_, Hashirama thought, an Uchiha with a frame sturdy as wood, seemingly with the incessant ebb and flow of others of the same name, a ground beneath his feet and the strength, the conviction, the vision, to claim it.

Hashirama remembers feeling something other than enmity then, while holding Madara's red, red gaze.

~.~

It's easier to be angry.

It's easier to walk away than to stay in the barrage of Madara's thinly veiled hostility, a relentless sea bashing against the sanctity of his appointment as the Shodaime, wrecking the bridges of respect and mutual admiration between them.

He didn't expect it.

He should have.

~.~

Hashirama clearly remembers Madara's face the day of the inauguration. Madara had smiled, put out a long-fingered hand in a mocking gesture of subordination, the way Tobirama had done far earlier. There had been nothing untoward in that act, nothing sinister.

But, as Hashirama walked away, he chanced a glance over his shoulder and saw it, the slightest creak in the wall of cool deception Madara had constructed: a profile pulled tight into a feral snarl, eyes in hate-crimson, a hand twisted into a claw.

~.~

Hashirama had only three warnings that the Madara would attack Konoha.

One, that face that disappeared as quickly as the flash of a gemstone the morning he was proclaimed Hokage.

Two, that terrible vehemence in Madara's voice one night as he whispered into Hashirama's neck the secret of how he'd amassed so much horrific power, _the Mangekyou_, he'd whispered, _terrible things_.

And three, a legend about Uchihas and madness.


	16. ItaShi

_ItaShi. Centripetal Force. Blackholes._

* * *

All through the meeting, even as his name treacherously crops up a fair number of times with varying epithets, Shisui watches Itachi; his cousin's angular face is set, the flux of his chakra steady, only the white-knuckled grip on the sleeve of his yukata give away his staunch disapproval of the entire scheme. He looks at Itachi's hair, inky even in the glow of firelight, reminiscent of surfaces of black lakes on moonless nights, a chasm so endless not even light could escape.

_Much like Itachi_, Shisui thinks, and he despairs.

Not even counting the political, only taking into account the Itachi's absurdity, it stood to reason that Shisui will be wretched one day, chasing after a lover whose loyalties were rooted deep into the blood-soaked earth of Konoha. What meaning will his life have then? A pair of hands, trying to grasp at something other than cool air to fill the hollows of its palms, something to temper them with meaning.

But Itachi could never be so small.

Itachi was a storm, and it wasn't easy to be the land a storm passes through, unknowing and uncaring of what it leaves in its wake, always flying in uncharted paths, always out of reach. Shisui doesn't want to admit he's lost Itachi, that there's ice like thick walls obscuring the space between them, that familiary had sank deep in his eyes and disappeared with a final mocking flash.

Shisui still hopes however, and that's why he is fatuously happy when Itachi beckons him to the Nakano once more.


End file.
